It’s been six months since President Trump took the oath of office and his administration began its all-out effort to gut federal science—though it’s understandable if it feels like even longer. If you’ve been following my blog posts, including my monthly round-ups, you know the relentless pace of attacks on science we’re seeing. My colleagues and I have been tracking federal government actions, decisions, or policies that undermine science or the scientific process. While our numbers are not a comprehensive representation of all the harmful actions committed by the current administration, the pattern is disturbing, clear, and a real danger to people’s lives.
If you’re opposed to this type of political interference and overreach, you’re not alone: people disapprove of the Trump administration’s systemic attack on the American scientific enterprise by a 2-to-1 margin. This is simply not what most people want to see.
Between January 20th and June 30th 2025, there have been 402 confirmed attacks on science—402 different instances where the Trump administration has silenced, co-opted, or politicized federal scientists, their work, or their research funding.
I’ll take a close look below at what happened in June, with an eye toward both the immediate impacts on economic, public, and environmental health and the potential for future harm. It can be discouraging to see so many attacks in one place, so thank you for reading and following along. For folks who came here to find out how they can help defend science and scientific integrity in the federal government, I’ve included resources at the bottom of this page.
What’s new to this month’s round-up: there have been some real wins for federal science, thanks to the tireless efforts of individuals and organizations across the country. Let’s start there.
Some good news for NIH science
Since my very first round-up, I’ve covered how the Trump administration has politicized federal funding and research, loudly and cynically claiming to be protecting science from ideology while subverting federal decisions and funding to their own agenda. This started with President Trump signing anti-DEI and anti-trans executive orders (EOs) in his first two weeks back in office. Many harmful governmental decisions and policies unfolded as a result, often springing from the Trump administration’s arbitrary exclusion criteria, targeting words that political officials see as connected to the broader topics of DEI, environmental justice, and gender identity. And other topics, like vaccine efficacy and uptake, were added to its no-go list later in alignment, with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s disturbing history of anti-vaccine bias and actions.
Based on this list, the Trump administration has sporadically halted federal funding—funding that was allocated and approved by Congress—and later rescinded it from recipients at academic and non-profit institutions across the country. And in many cases, the administration altered funding requirements to prevent research on certain topics like vaccine safety and efficacy, combatting misinformation, and LGBTQ+ health.
To date, this administration has rescinded thousands of research grants across federal agencies, including from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s largest biomedical research agency. This means scientists will not be able to address thousands of research questions, either in the short- or long-term. Even a small pause in the research process can stop the clock for developing more knowledge, and potentially render already-collected data useless. Pausing and eliminating biomedical research can mean more lives harmed by disease and illness.
Now you may be thinking: “Jules, I’ve read all about this in your other blogs, and this hardly sounds like good news for federal science.” And my dear reader, you would be correct.
The good news is that a federal judge recently ruled that the process the Trump administration used to rescind already-awarded NIH grants was illegal and discriminatory, and the judge ordered the immediate reinstatement of funding. A judge in California made a similar ruling regarding cancelled federal funding of University of California scientists. Current data estimates that around 900 NIH grants are eligible to be reinstated (if they haven’t been already). NIH officials have also paused the elimination of any additional grants according to the administration’s arbitrary stop words, according to a NIH memo disseminated almost two weeks after the federal court ruling. These court rulings and memos apply to terminated grants that focused on, or even acknowledged, things like gender identity, environmental justice, and minoritized groups.
This good news has some unfortunate caveats: NIH is currently only reinstating funding in certain states, and the Trump administration has filed an appeal on the federal court ruling. However, this is a promising development when it comes to the politicization of federal funding. There are thousands of grants from other federal agencies like the National Science Foundation and the Environmental Protection Agency that were eliminated based on the same arbitrary ideological criteria, among others. Most recently, the Department of Agriculture canceled almost 150 grants that they perceived as being related to DEI.
As you all know, things can change and develop very rapidly. Recently, NIH began laying people off on grant review panels, or panels that review grant applications and determine whether they should be funded. Reports say that political officials will be hired to fill in those gaps, to ensure grants are being awarded to align with the Trump administration’s political priorities.
Pushing out career staff and putting research priorities at the mercy of politics is a familiar tactic from the administration’s anti-science playbook. We’ve also seen this approach in the new executive order restricting federal science, and in its proposed “spoils system” federal hiring scheme. We’ll be closely watching to see how this develops, but in the meantime, we can be relieved that some courts are putting up roadblocks to the administration’s assault.
NOAA’s climate data website is moved and scrubbed
Unfortunately, as one battle is won, another front opens. Recently, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released innocuous-sounding but dangerous guidance for federal agencies, based on President Trump’s May 23 executive order. This guidance was released despite objections that scientific integrity experts, including my team here at UCS, have raised. We outlined our concerns and recommendations in a letter to OSTP Director Michael Kratsios last month. We expect federal agencies to soon begin releasing new scientific integrity policies that align with the Trump administration’s priorities. We’ll be watching closely to see what those policies include and what they leave out.
So far, we’ve seen political officials use the misleading language of this executive order in public pronouncements and in recent agency reports. However, in June we saw the first example of the EO and its accompanying OSTP guidance being used as justification to take down government websites, just a day after the OSTP guidance was released to the public.
A government website housed on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) website–climate.gov–had “a rich trove of climate data and information,” as my colleague Marc Alessi said. Before it was altered on June 23rd, the webpage had scientific information, guidance, and research on climate and weather patterns more generally.
In particular, there were webpages detailing predicted weather patterns by month, information on natural disasters and extreme weather events like the upcoming tornado season and negative impacts of wildfire smoke, and a whole dashboard of climate data that allowed users to track variation in things like greenhouse gases, sea level, and the Earth’s temperature over time.
We were braced for this website to shut down, because the Trump administration has laid off many of the federal workers who maintained it. Two weeks after the potential shutdown was first reported, those who went to the website were redirected to a different URL (noaa.gov/climate) where much of the rich content originally housed on climate.gov was deleted or made much harder to locate. However, front and center on top of noaa.gov/climate is a paragraph from June 24th explaining that this redirection was implemented to follow the May 23 EO and subsequent OSTP guidance. It did not provide any additional justification.
It is not actually clear how this website violated the EO and OSTP guidance. While the shutdown is not well-explained, it’s one more part of the broader pattern of the Trump administration’s anti-science actions, decisions, and policies.
The Trump administration has laid off federal workers and scientists who worked on climate science, weather patterns, and public health implications of climate change. It has pulled funding focused on climate science and research from universities. It has directed federal agencies to remove or substantially alter webpages, programs, and reports devoted to climate science and climate change. And as we’ve seen in other federal agencies like the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the Trump administration has hired scientists to fill in the gaps who refuse to accept the best available science on climate change. All these actions align with the plans to politicize climate science outlined in Project 2025, as well as the first Trump administration’s attacks on science.
Taking away accurate, useful information is an indefensible effort to fool the public. The evidence is undeniable: climate change and its impacts on our planet and public health are very real, and the majority of the public believes in this reality, no matter what funding is slashed or data erased.
Take action to protect federal science
When people work together, there can still be wins for federal science, even with the unprecedented number and ferocity of attacks on science we’ve observed since Inauguration Day. There is a role for everyone who is passionate about defending federal science from politicization; staying up to date on UCS’ blogs and analyses is a fantastic first step. Here are a few other ways that you can defend federal science.
- Use this easy link to contact your representatives in Congress and ask them to support and co-sponsor the Scientific Integrity (SI) Act. The SI Act would codify safeguards against political interference of science into law and is becoming increasingly more important as the Trump administration’s attacks on science continue.
- Are you interested in becoming more directly involved in conversations with elected officials about the importance of scientific integrity? Become a Scientific Integrity Champion! Interested readers can fill out their information here.
- Stay up to date and stay involved with any upcoming SI-related actions.